Forex Signal Service – A Look At The Time Zones
For an average trader, forex trading time zones can be intimidating and difficult . Like many others , when I first got involved in this cash 24 hour global market , I couldn’t make a lot of sense from the time zone issue. However, that changed over time and here I’m going to show you some of the basics on how the 24 hour market is handled by me and when you prepare for your next trading day, it will help you out .
You first need to think about where you’re living , or where you’ll be doing most of the forex signal service trading from. This alone is the biggest factor affecting how this 24 our market is looked at . For the purposes of our example here let’s suppose you reside in California on the West Coast of the United States in the Pacific Standard Time (PST) zone which is three hours behind East Coast time in New York.
Now that we know that California is where we’ll be doing the trading , which is three hours behind the East Coast , we can start planning our forex signal service trading day. In this 24 hour market that never sleeps ( although it does quiet on international holidays and weekends ) the trading day stops and resets with the New York financial centers closing at or around 5pm EST and the Far East banking centers of Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc. open and start a new day at roughly the same time. Taking this into consideration it is the best idea to have trading charts set in a way that the daily candle or bar that you are using closes at 5pm EST every day .
So now we’ve determined that we are trading from the West Coast in the US which happens to be three hours behind EST in New York and we also know when this 24 hour market stops and resets for the next day . Then we have to decide when we will get ready for another trading day. If California is where you live, as in our example here , and you’re a night owl then perhaps you’d like to get ready to trade the London session which is from 1am-4am PST or 4am- 7am PST. Maybe you want to sleep through the London session because you like sleeping but you don’t have a problem being up early, around 4am PST (7am EST) so you get a look at the end of the London session and get prepared for the session in New York which gets a good start at 8:30am EST or 5:30am PST. Or, finally, perhaps you hate waking up early and you prefer to trade in the middle of the day ; this is not a problem. Simply wait until about 2pm Pacific Standard Time when the day begins in Tokyo and you can trade FX during that major market session .
Now you clearly have knowledge of the major forex trading time zones and you can accordingly plan your days . And remember , planning and preparation are perhaps the two most over-looked, yet important factors of success in this business and any other business . Thinking this through you should be able to plan your forex signal service day.